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05/06/2008 REPORTS: IA, NE, KS, OK, TX, NM

All pics shot from 2 East of Kalvesta, KS

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5:59 PM Looking almost straight up :)

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6:01 PM Looking NNE

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6:57 PM Looking NNW

Dean Cosgrove
http://chasetours.com/
 
Yesterday Randy Bowers and I made the most of what otherwise was a terrible chase day. We stayed north of most of the other chasers and jumped on 2 storms west of Plainview. We were able to park and watch the storms for about 2 hours from the same spot. The bases of both storms were visible and could be seen trying to lower. Storms from the Lubbock area began to send out an outflow boundary to the north towards our storms. Just before the boundary arrived, both storms started getting pissed off. The eastern storm which was closest to us had over 70dbz at one point. When the outflow from the storms to the south intersected our storms, we observed an extremely rapidly developing wall cloud that had very tight rotation. Here is a 10 minute timelapse video compressed down to 1 minute. Also I have some stills taken with my Canon HV30. You can see the boundary cutting in from left to right and the rapid lowering and significant rotation. I don't know how we didn't get a tornado.

http://daniellamb.com/mattg/5-6-08/timelapse56082.wmv

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Well, Matt, I was like you and stayed north of the mess that was happening from Lubbock south. I jumped on the small cluster of nice, slow moving LP supercells due west of Plainview, TX. They were struggling for a while, and kept cycling over and over, as soon as one would reach severe limits, it would die out a bit, and then pulse back up again. Finally, about 7:30 or so, the eastern cell exploded, and things started to finally get a little interesting 10-15 miles or so west of Plainview. The eastern cell began to develop a little bit of a lowering and weak rotation was observed. I snapped off these pics at this time:

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A little later the storms to the south began racing north and were quickly approaching from the south. When the outflow bounday from these storms hit the cell west of Plainview, a wall cloud developed very, very quickly and was rotating quite rapidly. It didn't last too long, but at one point, I too thought this thing was going to produce a brief tornado. Here's a pic during this time:

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Overall, it wasn't too bad of a day...
 
Crane TX funnel clouds

Original target was Abilene to Lubbock, or perhaps even northward from there. Moisture recovery was slower than forecast, though, as was the speed of the main wave. Much of TX was socked in with cloud deck, but Parts of Panhandle and Trans Pecos region had substantial clearing. Drove west on 20 past ABI/Sweetwater towards the clear sky. Cellular mass fired up near Pecos. Soon, two areas were visible, The Pecos mass, and another more supercellular looking cell near Kermit, which seemed to split from the initial mass. I went after the Kermit cell and intercepted SW of Anderson, near No Trees, TX.

This cell looked okay, but not great, and the southern mass looked like it was possibly getting better organized, but lost radar and data at this time, and was not clear visually which area to go after. Talked to Bill Tabor, and I intially went NE to Anderson, but when I got there, Bill redirected me south to the southern cells, which had evolved into a supercell with TVS. It took a while to get down there, but I caught the cell in Crane, TX near 6 p.m. CDT.

Was late for the show. I approached from the North on 385, so I missed all the excitement that went on South of town. Started seeing a wall cloud at about 6:04. which appered to be just South of town. As I got closer, took several minutes of video of the wall cloud with several rapidly rotating funnels- no torando was ever apparent:
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A few more vidcaps below taken from a ~4 minute sequence moving south into Crane, looking just south of town, from 6:04 to 6:08 p.m., give or take a minute. Approximate time is included in the filename. Was taking small hail for most of it, with borderline severe hail a few minutes later (after the vidcaps).
Followed the cell east a little ways, but it seemed to be weakening. I let it go and hung around Odessa for a bit, waiting to see if anything else might be catchable before sunset. Ran into a group from Italy, including two guys named Andrev and Dino, whose last names I forgot somewhere on the long drive back to Austin.

Thanks to Bill Tabor for nowcasting, and alerting me to the intensification of the cells south of I-20 in my time of Alltel-lessnes.

980 miles
17.5 hours

TonyC
 
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